MODERN FAIRIES
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY ENCOUNTERS WITH THE LITTLE PEOPLE
What did I want to achieve by collecting these fragments of the ‘impossible’?
I
n December 2014 I launched, in Fortean Times, the Fairy Census: an online survey of people who had had fairy experiences (see FT321:25). The Census has led to many good things. In December 2017, Gibson
Square brought out Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies 500 AD
to the Present, with three bonus chapters on emigrant fairies in North America. Magical Folk is the first major study of British and Irish fairies in almost half a century and includes data from the Census. I will shortly release the experiences I received free and anonymously online as a single 160,000-word pdf publication: The Fairy Census, 2014
2017. My hope is that this will kick off a new phase of collection and that in 2020 or thereabouts I’ll be able to come back with more.
I am by no means the first person to attempt a fairy study of this type. In the background were two particularly important surveys that served as inspirations. First, there was Walter Evans Wentz’s Fairy
Faith in Celtic Countries (1911). Evans Wentz, a bohemian American with a gift for making friends and money, spent several months in 1907, 1908, and 1909 scouring rural communities in Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, Man, Scotland and Wales for fairy experiences and fairy folklore. The second was Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies, completed in 1996, but only published in English in 2014 by Anomalist Books. Marjorie collected fairy experiences from the 1930s through to the 1990s and, with loving care, ran these together into a single tome (see FT321:30-37, 38-45).
What did I want to achieve and what did I actually achieve by collecting these fragments of the ‘impossible’? For all my veneration of Evans Wentz and Johnson, there is an important difference between their works and the Fairy Census. Both Evans Wentz (who tried again and again to see fairies but failed) and Marjorie Johnson (who constantly saw fairies and sometimes did not want to) had a simple end game in view. They hoped to prove the existence of fairies to a doubting world, albeit in very different ways; how Evans Wentz got snooty old Oxford University Press to publish his Fairy Faith is an enduring mystery. My aim is much more modest. I want to understand not whether fairies exist, but what kind of people have fairy experiences and in what circumstances. I like this aim because there is a real chance of progress.
I had hoped to bring in 1,000 experiences. I didn’t make it. But I got, with the help of social media, various magazines, newspapers and radio stations, just over 500. These ranged from five words (the haiku-like: ‘tiny high-pitched bells and flutes’) to thousands of words, and were often extremely well written: three or four could stand as rather creepy short stories. The most effective help in fairy hunting, without any question, came from
Fortean Times: so, a huge thanks to all its readers. You brought in three times more responses than your nearest rival, Radio New Zealand, and about 10 times more than the Daily Express! The records came, above all, from the English-speaking world: 230 from Canada and the United States; 190 from Britain and Ireland; and 40 from Australia and New Zealand. Even the 40 or so records from the rest of the world have a salting of English-speaking tourists. The Census is somewhat provincial, then, but experiences are at least coming out of
similar Anglophone cultures, which should be useful for purposes of comparison.
EXTRAORDINARY ENCOUNTERS
Well actually, even within the narrow band of the English-speaking world, definitions of ‘fairy’ have changed enormously over the last century; or perhaps it would be truer to say that they have fragmented. There is, for example, a long tradition of fairies carrying lights, dating back at least to the early modern period. But, today, many people quite routinely interpret what forteans call ‘earth lights’, and what our ancestors would have referred to, instead, as Willo’-the-Wisp (or some equivalent term), as fairies. I suspect that this has been helped along by digital photography and the fairy ‘orbs’ seen as a result. Another big change in fairy iconography is the appearance of wings. When Evans Wentz looked at fairies in 1907-1909 he did not record a single example of a fairy with wings. Marjorie Johnson – post Cottingley, where wings had featured in each of the five photographs (see FT356:30-35) – gathered a few winged fairies between the 1930s and the 1990s. In the Fairy Census, perhaps half of seen fairies have wings: in one case fairy wings are even recorded for Ireland.
There were also many miscellaneous ‘weird’ experiences where the person responding to the questionnaire suspected that he or she had seen a fairy, sometimes stating this very tentatively, and often only after explaining why this could not be a ghost, alien or angel. There is sometimes, I think, the sense of: ‘what else could it be?’ So, for instance, you see a miniature luminous cat by the side of the road: fairy! You see little wolf men while you are trying to get to sleep: fairies! What is interesting here is that, 500 years ago, this kind of ‘manifestation’ would have been seen as a ghost or a demon. But modern ghosts are much more limited in their range and demons have all but vanished, save among fringe Evangelicals. It is often said that modern fairies are kind. I am tempted to think that, rather, ‘kind’ things are classed as fairies. But even that doesn’t stand up. For example, the wolf men described above were clearly a nightmarish memory for a man recalling childhood encounters.
Whatever fairies looked like, the encounters were, as can be imagined, extraordinary, bewildering and sometimes disturbing. There was the man who swatted a fairy dead in a supermarket queue in Scotland. The young woman in Massachusetts who had a group of fairies “grope my boob”. The child playing in the Amazon rain forest who pulled her sister’s hair only to find that her ‘sister’, when she turned, had an old man’s face. The lemon-headed fairy who came out in the night to examine a petrified young man in his bed. The swimmer who spotted a leprechaun walking across the bottom of a swimming pool. The Midwestern girl who encountered a rabbit with trousers on. The multi-coloured fairy ponies on an island in a river in Yorkshire. The mud man and dryads who joined in a midnight dance at a music festival in the south of England…
‘REGULARS’ AND ‘NEVERS’
But if the experiences were extraordinary so were the ways that people processed them; the Fairy Census encouraged those who replied to give their own views on the experience. I pinned several of the more striking sentences I had collected over my desk as a kind of mental trampoline: when I was low on energy I would read them to bring me back up. “He really did look like a little Santa Claus, except for the red skin, horns and tail.” “I think that fairies are something more in the middle – like a Baudrillardian-type post-modern fairy.” “I do not condone this method for seeing faeries because it is highly addictive and more dangerous than methamphetamines.” “Fairies probably do not exist,” from a young Australian woman who had had several fairy experiences after a head trauma. Or, my personal favourite, the American who was so terrified at seeing a fairy that she ran to her car screaming: “We have to get into technology and drive away.”
So, did my attempt to examine those who’d had the fairy experience pay off? The truth is that I don’t yet know. I asked 40 questions to try and pin respondents down. What is your religion? Do you suffer
“He really did look like a little Santa Claus, except for the red skin, horns and tail...”
from sight or hearing conditions? How many books have you read about fairies? Do you often lose track of time? I have simply not, so far, been able, to get my head around this mass of additional data. It will take another year to make sense of it. But a few things can quickly be shredded. Educational attainments, for example, might be relevant for voting intentions or income: but they seem to have very little to do with whether or not you will come face-to-face with the fey. University professors, researchers, and PhDs wrote in with their experiences – including, unexpectedly, two I know! Would a breakdown of humanities, social sciences and sciences for graduates have brought worthwhile results? Probably not.
The most interesting question for me has been the one about the frequency of supernatural experiences. Here three possibilities were offered: do you have regular supernatural experiences; occasional supernatural experiences; or have you had no (or hardly any) supernatural experiences? I have long had a suspicion that many fortean classics have actually been reported by ‘regulars’. This does not invalidate their accounts, of course, but it is context that we are usually lacking: investigators typically ask ‘what did you see’, not ‘how does this fit into your psychic history’. It is very difficult to be empirical here but ‘regulars’ tend to have more baroque and surreal experiences, and also less scary ones. The grittiest and most frightening accounts come from ‘nevers’. A regular’s experiences can often be like straying into a curiously benign Salvador Dali pastoral. A never’s experience resembles, rather, a Norman Rockwell painting that has gone horribly wrong: boggarts grinning under the Thanksgiving table; leprous elf ears sticking out of jam jars.
There are also patterns in the circumstances of sightings. An interesting category, and one that I have previously signalled in Fortean Times, is the number of people driving or travelling in a car when they see ‘something’. Part of me thinks that, as we spend a great deal of our lives in cars, it is inevitable that some sightings will be associated with cars: another, and a louder part of me, thinks that, no, there is something significant here. One woman talked of seeing fairies when “I am relaxed but focused”: is that relevant for car fairies? By far the largest group, though, are the scores who were in bed, had just woken up, were just about to go to bed or who were exhausted when they saw or heard their fairy. This is particularly true of children and adolescents. My favourite sub-category is children interacting with fairies in bed. These ‘children’ often recall their encounter 30 or 40 years later, insisting that it was not a dream: only two described obvious signs of sleep paralysis. Many talk of “a sense that the experience marked a turning point in your life”.
TURNING POINTS
Something to emerge from the Census is how often encounters with fairies were viewed as being significant: a moment that changed things for ever. In fact, almost 25 per cent of those who saw fairies ticked a ‘turning point’ box on the questionnaire. Cases ranged from the woman who understood her childhood fairy encounter as marking the beginning of a psychic vocation, to the man, who, after a fairy encounter in Norfolk, wrote “I am a pragmatic scientist atheist ( or was)” (my italics). This is something that comes through sightings of other forms of the supernatural or the otherworldly: UFOs, mysterious hominids in the wilds, ghosts… In some cases, it is just a question of an inconvenient fact slapping you hard in the face: reality is not as you thought. In other cases, it seems like a ‘shamanic’ awakening, with familiars butting their way into your life to show
you ‘the way’. There, for me, is the most humbling lesson from the data in the Fairy Census.
So, do fairies exist – or don’t they? Certainly, none of the points above need either validate or invalidate your view on that question. After all, let’s take as a given (which it should not be) that driving can induce a slight hypnotic state and driver X sees a fairy. Well, there are two ways to read this. The first is that the hypnotic state created X’s fairy. The second is that the hypnotic state ‘tore back the veil’ and showed X something that was always there but that X was normally too ‘mired in the material’ to see. The Fairy Census changes nothing in this regard and I doubt that any survey ever will, unless, just possibly, in some distant future, neurologists come up with PET scanners that can be injected into our scalps.
All we can realistically do for now is to shuffle closer and closer to an understanding of what these ‘lived dreams’ mean. When I began the survey, I had the prejudice that though I was only asking about fairies, all supernatural encounters were really, ultimately the same. That prejudice has now hardened. In fact, I’d throw mermaids, ET and Yeti in there, too. Many who filled out the survey clearly are not of this opinion, however: particularly ‘regulars’. They have many interesting things to say here.
As to the existence of fairies and other things that go bump in our lives, I personally have only one certainty – namely, that all of this matters; both the fact of seeing ‘things’ and the vision itself. There have been several large-scale population-wide surveys of supernatural or psychic experiences over the past 120 years: unlike the Fairy Census these were not self-selecting. They suggest that between five and 25 five per cent of citizens of industrialised western countries have notable supernatural or psychic experiences in their lives. In British terms that means that between three and fifteen million people see or live things that the rest of the population would rather not think about.
Imagine, now, that we were talking about an ethnic or sexual or social minority of these dimensions. Several king’s ransoms would be thrown, by the (doubtless reluctant) taxpayer, at university departments, at hoardings on the Underground and at think tanks. I am not advocating anything like this: in fact, spending money would be a bad idea for all kinds of reasons. But a little more respect for and curiosity about people who have seen ‘things’ would go a long way: in part, because respect and curiosity have rarely hurt anyone; in part, because there are perhaps wider lessons here about how we relate to hidden but important parts of ourselves.
Disagree with this or with some of the other sentiments above? One of the reasons I have provided the basic Fairy Census data in an open format is so others can use the information gathered there to their own different ends. I’ve put the Census up at www.fairyist.com/survey/ and at https:// umbra.academia.edu/simonyoung, where a Google or a Facebook account will get you access. I’m always interested to hear opinions on these matters: contact details are within the Fairy Census pdf.
If, on the other hand, you have an experience of your own to record, then please fill in the online questionnaire. Rest assured that your anonymity will be respected and if need be protected. There is also a parallel and, unfortunately, little used survey for second-hand experiences: e.g. a fairy meeting that your grandmother told you about 30 years ago. As long as you can read the English of the survey we at Fairy Census central can deal with responses in French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and, on good days, Dutch and German: perhaps next time we’ll break out of the Anglosphere! I’ll publish Fairy Census II when I get another 500 sightings in…
The Fairy Census questionnaire can be found at: www.fairyist.com/survey The Fairy Census can be found at: www.fairyist.
com/survey and https://umbra.academia.edu/ simonyoung